You're both right. He has dual citizenship. It's interesting that you were so eager to try to correct the person who spoke of Hungary being "his country." The country of his birth is arguably more "his country" than the other country in which he holds citizenship.
Many presenters do nothing more than read aloud the text on the screen. That adds zero value, for those of us who know how to read. I've been guilty of that myself a time or two, when I was forced to give a PowerPoint presentation and didn't have time to think about how I could add some value beyond the on-screen text.
And then there are the times when a slide is full of small text, and the presenter moves on to the next slide before the audience has had a chance to read it all. If you didn't intend for us to read all those words, why did you put them in the slide in the first place?
Apparently I need to repeat this fact: companies that make a net positive contribution to the Treasury in no way meet the definition of "subsidized."
The situation you describe may be shenanigans, or corruption, or plain old bad policy; but if the company still makes a net positive contribution to the state treasury after keeping those funds, it has not received a subsidy.
I guess if you were running NASA you'd pay a billion dollars per o-ring
No, he wouldn't have to pay a billion dollars per O-ring, because many competitors would undercut any vendor who unreasonably asks for a billion dollars per O-ring.
Allowing free markets to develop puts an upper limit on the the prices of goods and services, because lots of competitors -- who will need to undercut each others' prices in order to gain market share -- strive to get into the most lucrative sectors. Financial services are no exception.
he's taking money from each and every taxpayer by having the government subsidize his employees.
Please don't make up your own definition of "subsidy." A subsidy is a payment that allows an unprofitable enterprise to continue operating. Very few companies receive subsidies. Amtrak is one of the rare compaines that does. Amtrak has never paid taxes, because it has never had any profits on which taxes could be assessed. McDonalds has certainly not received subsidies. If a government chooses to create an entitlement program that benefits the low-income employees of company X, it doesn't mean that company X has been subsidized.
Now, those entitlements create a marginally higher standard of living for the employees of company X, which makes them marginally less likely to go on strike or otherwise demand higher wages. That makes for a valid argument against entitlement programs: they shield employers from some of the blowback that goes with paying low wages. Still, companies that make a net positive contribution to the Treasury in no way meet the definition of "subsidized."
I've heard some people make the false claim -- mostly regarding oil companies -- that "a tax reduction is the same thing as a subsidy." No, it's not. To be consistent, these people would also have to claim that "a subsidy reduction is the same thing as a tax."
Amtrak experienced a subsidy reduction a few years ago (it got $1,555 million in FY2010, and $1,475 million in FY2011). Does that mean Amtrak paid tax? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. A subsidy reduction is not a tax, and a tax reduction is not a subsidy.
The reason CEOs get paid so much is not because the free market prices them so high. It's because they are on each others' Board of Directors and they all figured out they could overcharge their companies and share the spoils amongst themselves.
This paragraph of yours contains two contradictory ideas. The second sentence implies collusion to fix prices. Where collusion is taking place, there is not a free market. And where there is a free market, collusion does not take place.
Coming from the aerospace industry, you cannot have software that has bugs.
Ideally, yes, but how do you propose to achieve that ideal?
I'm in the aerospace software industry too, and so far 57,000 defect reports have been generated in the program I work on.
My company's CEO recently informed us employees that we are going to start "executing flawlessly." "What a relief," I thought sarcastically. "Now we'll be able to shut down the database that documents those 57,000 defects."
Please enlighten us as to how your program achieved zero defects.
What I've always wondered is, how does the infection rate relate to the number of bacteria? Is "it only takes one" a true statement? I.e., if just one bacterium slips through the filter, are you as likely to get an infection as if a million slipped through? Or is there some "critical number" of bacteria, below which a normal immune system can easily handle things, but above which infection tends to set in?
Starting a brand new automobile company anywhere, much less in America, is so difficult that it really should be seen as a miracle
Yes, every industry has "barriers to entry." But what makes this a miracle-cubed is that Mr. Musk has overcome those barriers in multiple industries: autos (Tesla), financial services (PayPal), energy (Solar City), and even radically-cost-effective spaceships (SpaceX).
You have to admit, he has an amazing ability to knock down barriers to entry!
Maybe, but it would be a very low-density object with lots of surface area. With such a tiny ballistic coefficient, the atmosphere would slow it down to a very low terminal velocity and it would hit the ground (or more likely, the ocean surface) gently.
Even its biggest proponent acknowledged that some people laugh at the idea. In response to the question "when will the space elevator be built?" Sir Arthur C. Clarke said "about 10 years after everyone stops laughing."
You, and I, could see that as the police prioritising their time and a good thing. The fact that it has been shown, again and again, that discretion isn't applied equally to different races and genders should make us reconsider that though. I shouldn't be getting an easier ride from law enforcement because I'm white middle class than someone who is black lower class, but 'discretion' encourages exactly that.
Discretion, like any other tool, may be used appropriately or inappropriately; so don't just blame "discretion," drill down and blame the inappropriate use of discretion.
Re:An overly-romantic view of hunter-gatherer soci
on
Star Trek Economics
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· Score: 1
Did you even read my comment? I am not talking about any of the same things you mention.
You said that in "hunter-gather based societies," "They invariably, share and share alike." You also said they are "different" from modern Western civilization, and you talked about " Ownership of resources (like the only water supply for the entire village)".
Things that you talked about were the entire foundation for my post, and your reaction makes me wonder if you even read my comment.
You also described monetary systems as "inefficiencies." Do you really think that bartering, say, a coop full of chickens for a wagon wheel, is more efficient than conducting transactions using money?
Rent-seeking is defined as "spending wealth on political lobbying to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating wealth."
This tells us two things:
1. Rent-seeking happens when government is susceptible to political corruption. (Corrupt governments can reward the non-creation of wealth, but free markets never do.)
2. A democracy or republic with well-informed voters, who have the ability to fire politicians that don't act in the public interest, is less susceptible to rent-seeking than other forms of government.
In anarcho-capitalism (a term coined by libertarian Murray Rothbard), society would operate under a mutually agreed-upon libertarian "legal code which would be generally accepted, and which the courts would pledge themselves to follow." This pact would recognize sovereignty of the individual and the principle of non-aggression.
No system could be more diametrically opposed to feudalism, in which serfs lived in a state of bondage (the "sovereignty of the individual" was nonexistent). Indeed, Rothbard's colleague, fellow libertarian, and Nobel Prize-winner Friedrich Hayek wrote a cautionary book titled "The Road to Serfdom."
An overly-romantic view of hunter-gatherer society
on
Star Trek Economics
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· Score: 1
Are you trying to imply that members of hunter-gatherer societies were more charitable than members of Western civilization? Even if they were inclined to be more charitable, which is dubious, they didn't have the means to be more charitable. When the hunter-gatherer has eaten some of the scrawny basket of berries she picked that day, there is very little left over to give to her lame and blind grandmother. If I were a disabled person who could choose to live in either a modern Western civilization or a hunter-gatherer society, you can guess which one I'd choose.
A more modern analogy to the village water supply is an electric utility. Private ownership of electric utilities is pretty common. It serves the public well because if I am a private owner of an electric utility (i.e. a shareholder), I will profit more if I insist that management maintains the reliability of transmission systems, expands generating capacity to keep up with demand, and provides high-quality power (as opposed to a supply full of power spikes and brownouts).
Exactly right: some resources have always been effectively infinite -- I can breath as rapidly as possible, and never exhaust the supply of air around me -- and some resources, like electrical power, have become more abundant and accessible. But the "finiteness" of other resources is staying the same, or dwindling.
And even though lots of people like to complain about free markets, no one has invented a superior way to allocate finite resources.
Even if we construct off-world habitats that contain a million times more beachfront property than Earth does, it will still be a finite resource.
So, talk of a "post-scarcity economy" is extremely premature.
Material abundance is not everywhere, and merely asserting that it is (or should be) will not make it so.
In 2014, things are certainly more abundant than they used to be. But the same was true if you compared living conditions 2000 years ago to living conditions 3000 years ago. Progress was made during that 1000-year interval: the number of people living in structures built by carpenters, as opposed to living in mud huts, increased.
We're still quite a long way from the kind of abundance where you can consume whatever you want, and dispatch with having an economy. The purpose of an economy is to allocate finite resources efficiently, where they will do the most good. Even if there were 1000 times more resources than there are now, it would still be a good idea to allocate them efficiently.
Not thinking in terms of scarcity leads to behaviors like this: Joe in Nome, Alaska has a house that he can't be bothered to insulate, and in the middle of winter, on the whim of feeling a chill, he cranks his thermostat up to 100F. (Also, he couldn't be bothered to close his windows at any time during this winter.) If there is no economy providing disincentives to behave that way, why not behave that way? You can see how society would instantly collapse from the inefficient allocation of resources.
Thinking in terms of scarcity directly results in much higher standards of living for everyone.
Until bird-sized drones become as cheap as disposable cell phones, no one will fork out money for a one that's limited to the single use of scouting traffic, or limited to being able to communicate only with a Renault vehicle. It will have to be a general-purpose device, able to communicate via wi-fi (or similar non-proprietary means) with other computing devices.
And there are better ways to gather data about traffic... such as the Waze app, which knows the precise speed and position of other Waze users who are themselves stuck in the same traffic.
The concern about a driver trying to control two vehicles at once seems silly. Any consumer-grade drone is never going to ask that of its owner; it will be able to autonomously deploy, perform its task, and return home.
Maybe Renault will release a sucky beta version of its drone.
needed is fresh ideas, better ways to get involved in duscussion, *more* interactivity and possibly ability to connect among its users
Yes -- give users the option of accepting private messages from other users. Often I've come across a comment whose author is clearly an expert in some field, and I've wanted to pick his or her brain.
If Slashdot enabled this kind of collaboration among experts, it might actaully become the enabler for breakthroughs in various fields, such as particle physics or computer science.
Every time Adobe releases a new version of Flash, I install it, hoping against hope that finally Flash will no longer crash several times per week (or drain my laptop battery like a vampire). If Adobe has such enlightened management, why haven't those things been fixed?
When for-profit corporations perform research, they usually do so with integrity, i.e., their goal is to genuinely advance the state-of-the-art of whatever field is being researched. Only in a small minority of cases is their goal to perpetrate a scam. Just sayin.
An interesting side-note is the idea of the universe keeping track of all possible outcomes until a measurement is made. If this works as predicted, the universe will have to keep track of 2^3000 possible outcomes
The theory says that a quantum computer can simply offload this monumental task to a vague entity that you call "the universe." Doesn't this strike you as a little too good to be true? The ultimate "free lunch," or a violation of conservation of-something-or-other?
TFA makes me feel justified in my skepticism.
Another question... if quantum computing is real, can it be used to speed up Bitcoin mining by a few orders of magnitude?
Slashdot Mirror
You're both right. He has dual citizenship. It's interesting that you were so eager to try to correct the person who spoke of Hungary being "his country." The country of his birth is arguably more "his country" than the other country in which he holds citizenship.
Many presenters do nothing more than read aloud the text on the screen. That adds zero value, for those of us who know how to read. I've been guilty of that myself a time or two, when I was forced to give a PowerPoint presentation and didn't have time to think about how I could add some value beyond the on-screen text.
And then there are the times when a slide is full of small text, and the presenter moves on to the next slide before the audience has had a chance to read it all. If you didn't intend for us to read all those words, why did you put them in the slide in the first place?
Apparently I need to repeat this fact: companies that make a net positive contribution to the Treasury in no way meet the definition of "subsidized."
The situation you describe may be shenanigans, or corruption, or plain old bad policy; but if the company still makes a net positive contribution to the state treasury after keeping those funds, it has not received a subsidy.
I guess if you were running NASA you'd pay a billion dollars per o-ring
No, he wouldn't have to pay a billion dollars per O-ring, because many competitors would undercut any vendor who unreasonably asks for a billion dollars per O-ring.
Allowing free markets to develop puts an upper limit on the the prices of goods and services, because lots of competitors -- who will need to undercut each others' prices in order to gain market share -- strive to get into the most lucrative sectors. Financial services are no exception.
he's taking money from each and every taxpayer by having the government subsidize his employees.
Please don't make up your own definition of "subsidy." A subsidy is a payment that allows an unprofitable enterprise to continue operating. Very few companies receive subsidies. Amtrak is one of the rare compaines that does. Amtrak has never paid taxes, because it has never had any profits on which taxes could be assessed. McDonalds has certainly not received subsidies. If a government chooses to create an entitlement program that benefits the low-income employees of company X, it doesn't mean that company X has been subsidized.
Now, those entitlements create a marginally higher standard of living for the employees of company X, which makes them marginally less likely to go on strike or otherwise demand higher wages. That makes for a valid argument against entitlement programs: they shield employers from some of the blowback that goes with paying low wages. Still, companies that make a net positive contribution to the Treasury in no way meet the definition of "subsidized."
I've heard some people make the false claim -- mostly regarding oil companies -- that "a tax reduction is the same thing as a subsidy." No, it's not. To be consistent, these people would also have to claim that "a subsidy reduction is the same thing as a tax."
Amtrak experienced a subsidy reduction a few years ago (it got $1,555 million in FY2010, and $1,475 million in FY2011). Does that mean Amtrak paid tax? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. A subsidy reduction is not a tax, and a tax reduction is not a subsidy.
The reason CEOs get paid so much is not because the free market prices them so high. It's because they are on each others' Board of Directors and they all figured out they could overcharge their companies and share the spoils amongst themselves.
This paragraph of yours contains two contradictory ideas. The second sentence implies collusion to fix prices. Where collusion is taking place, there is not a free market. And where there is a free market, collusion does not take place.
Coming from the aerospace industry, you cannot have software that has bugs.
Ideally, yes, but how do you propose to achieve that ideal?
I'm in the aerospace software industry too, and so far 57,000 defect reports have been generated in the program I work on.
My company's CEO recently informed us employees that we are going to start "executing flawlessly." "What a relief," I thought sarcastically. "Now we'll be able to shut down the database that documents those 57,000 defects."
Please enlighten us as to how your program achieved zero defects.
What I've always wondered is, how does the infection rate relate to the number of bacteria? Is "it only takes one" a true statement? I.e., if just one bacterium slips through the filter, are you as likely to get an infection as if a million slipped through? Or is there some "critical number" of bacteria, below which a normal immune system can easily handle things, but above which infection tends to set in?
Starting a brand new automobile company anywhere, much less in America, is so difficult that it really should be seen as a miracle
Yes, every industry has "barriers to entry." But what makes this a miracle-cubed is that Mr. Musk has overcome those barriers in multiple industries: autos (Tesla), financial services (PayPal), energy (Solar City), and even radically-cost-effective spaceships (SpaceX).
You have to admit, he has an amazing ability to knock down barriers to entry!
Could we end up with tangles miles in diameter?
Maybe, but it would be a very low-density object with lots of surface area. With such a tiny ballistic coefficient, the atmosphere would slow it down to a very low terminal velocity and it would hit the ground (or more likely, the ocean surface) gently.
Where did the story's submitter get that from?
Even its biggest proponent acknowledged that some people laugh at the idea. In response to the question "when will the space elevator be built?" Sir Arthur C. Clarke said "about 10 years after everyone stops laughing."
You, and I, could see that as the police prioritising their time and a good thing. The fact that it has been shown, again and again, that discretion isn't applied equally to different races and genders should make us reconsider that though. I shouldn't be getting an easier ride from law enforcement because I'm white middle class than someone who is black lower class, but 'discretion' encourages exactly that.
Discretion, like any other tool, may be used appropriately or inappropriately; so don't just blame "discretion," drill down and blame the inappropriate use of discretion.
Did you even read my comment? I am not talking about any of the same things you mention.
You said that in "hunter-gather based societies," "They invariably, share and share alike." You also said they are "different" from modern Western civilization, and you talked about " Ownership of resources (like the only water supply for the entire village)".
Things that you talked about were the entire foundation for my post, and your reaction makes me wonder if you even read my comment.
You also described monetary systems as "inefficiencies." Do you really think that bartering, say, a coop full of chickens for a wagon wheel, is more efficient than conducting transactions using money?
Rent-seeking is defined as "spending wealth on political lobbying to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating wealth."
This tells us two things:
1. Rent-seeking happens when government is susceptible to political corruption. (Corrupt governments can reward the non-creation of wealth, but free markets never do.)
2. A democracy or republic with well-informed voters, who have the ability to fire politicians that don't act in the public interest, is less susceptible to rent-seeking than other forms of government.
In anarcho-capitalism (a term coined by libertarian Murray Rothbard), society would operate under a mutually agreed-upon libertarian "legal code which would be generally accepted, and which the courts would pledge themselves to follow." This pact would recognize sovereignty of the individual and the principle of non-aggression.
No system could be more diametrically opposed to feudalism, in which serfs lived in a state of bondage (the "sovereignty of the individual" was nonexistent). Indeed, Rothbard's colleague, fellow libertarian, and Nobel Prize-winner Friedrich Hayek wrote a cautionary book titled "The Road to Serfdom."
he's using game theory to disorient his opponents
Would this strategy disorient Watson?
Are you trying to imply that members of hunter-gatherer societies were more charitable than members of Western civilization? Even if they were inclined to be more charitable, which is dubious, they didn't have the means to be more charitable. When the hunter-gatherer has eaten some of the scrawny basket of berries she picked that day, there is very little left over to give to her lame and blind grandmother. If I were a disabled person who could choose to live in either a modern Western civilization or a hunter-gatherer society, you can guess which one I'd choose.
A more modern analogy to the village water supply is an electric utility. Private ownership of electric utilities is pretty common. It serves the public well because if I am a private owner of an electric utility (i.e. a shareholder), I will profit more if I insist that management maintains the reliability of transmission systems, expands generating capacity to keep up with demand, and provides high-quality power (as opposed to a supply full of power spikes and brownouts).
There is only so much beach front property
Exactly right: some resources have always been effectively infinite -- I can breath as rapidly as possible, and never exhaust the supply of air around me -- and some resources, like electrical power, have become more abundant and accessible. But the "finiteness" of other resources is staying the same, or dwindling.
And even though lots of people like to complain about free markets, no one has invented a superior way to allocate finite resources.
Even if we construct off-world habitats that contain a million times more beachfront property than Earth does, it will still be a finite resource.
So, talk of a "post-scarcity economy" is extremely premature.
Material abundance is not everywhere, and merely asserting that it is (or should be) will not make it so.
In 2014, things are certainly more abundant than they used to be. But the same was true if you compared living conditions 2000 years ago to living conditions 3000 years ago. Progress was made during that 1000-year interval: the number of people living in structures built by carpenters, as opposed to living in mud huts, increased.
We're still quite a long way from the kind of abundance where you can consume whatever you want, and dispatch with having an economy. The purpose of an economy is to allocate finite resources efficiently, where they will do the most good. Even if there were 1000 times more resources than there are now, it would still be a good idea to allocate them efficiently.
Not thinking in terms of scarcity leads to behaviors like this: Joe in Nome, Alaska has a house that he can't be bothered to insulate, and in the middle of winter, on the whim of feeling a chill, he cranks his thermostat up to 100F. (Also, he couldn't be bothered to close his windows at any time during this winter.) If there is no economy providing disincentives to behave that way, why not behave that way? You can see how society would instantly collapse from the inefficient allocation of resources.
Thinking in terms of scarcity directly results in much higher standards of living for everyone.
Until bird-sized drones become as cheap as disposable cell phones, no one will fork out money for a one that's limited to the single use of scouting traffic, or limited to being able to communicate only with a Renault vehicle. It will have to be a general-purpose device, able to communicate via wi-fi (or similar non-proprietary means) with other computing devices.
And there are better ways to gather data about traffic... such as the Waze app, which knows the precise speed and position of other Waze users who are themselves stuck in the same traffic.
The concern about a driver trying to control two vehicles at once seems silly. Any consumer-grade drone is never going to ask that of its owner; it will be able to autonomously deploy, perform its task, and return home.
Maybe Renault will release a sucky beta version of its drone.
the comments pages have been increasingly dominated by childish anti-beta messages
They may be childish, but if they're the only thing that gets Dice to hit the brakes before driving over the cliff, they will have been worth it.
needed is fresh ideas, better ways to get involved in duscussion, *more* interactivity and possibly ability to connect among its users
Yes -- give users the option of accepting private messages from other users. Often I've come across a comment whose author is clearly an expert in some field, and I've wanted to pick his or her brain.
If Slashdot enabled this kind of collaboration among experts, it might actaully become the enabler for breakthroughs in various fields, such as particle physics or computer science.
Beta sucks
Every time Adobe releases a new version of Flash, I install it, hoping against hope that finally Flash will no longer crash several times per week (or drain my laptop battery like a vampire). If Adobe has such enlightened management, why haven't those things been fixed?
When for-profit corporations perform research, they usually do so with integrity, i.e., their goal is to genuinely advance the state-of-the-art of whatever field is being researched. Only in a small minority of cases is their goal to perpetrate a scam. Just sayin.
An interesting side-note is the idea of the universe keeping track of all possible outcomes until a measurement is made. If this works as predicted, the universe will have to keep track of 2^3000 possible outcomes
The theory says that a quantum computer can simply offload this monumental task to a vague entity that you call "the universe." Doesn't this strike you as a little too good to be true? The ultimate "free lunch," or a violation of conservation of-something-or-other?
TFA makes me feel justified in my skepticism.
Another question... if quantum computing is real, can it be used to speed up Bitcoin mining by a few orders of magnitude?